This great and terrible poem, the very crown or coping-stone of all theChâtiments, has a certain affinity with two others in which the poet's yearning after justice and mercy has borne his passionate imagination as high and far as here. InSultan Mouradhis immeasurable and incomparable depth of pity and charity seems well nigh to have swallowed up all sense of necessary retribution: it is perhaps because the portentous array of crimes enumerated is remote in time and place from all experience of ours that conscience can allow the tenderness and sublimity of its inspiration to justify the moral and ratify the sentence of the poem:—
Viens! tu fus bon un jour, sois à jamais heureux.Entre, transfiguré! tes crimes ténébreux,Ô roi, derrière toi s'effacent dans les gloires;Tourne la tête, et vois blanchir tes ailes noires.
But in the crowning song of all the great three cycles every need and every instinct of the spirit may find the perfect exaltation of content. The vast and profound sense of ultimate and inevitable equity which animates every line of it is as firm and clear as the solid and massive splendor of its articulate expression. The date of it is outside and beyond the lapse of the centuries of time; but the rule of the law of righteousness is there more evident and indisputable than ever during the flight of these. Hardly in the Hebrew prophecies is such distinct and vivid sublimity, as of actual and all but palpable vision, so thoroughly impregnated with moral and spiritual emotion. Not a verse of all that strike root into the memory forever but is great alike by imagination and by faith. In such a single line as this—
Que qui n'entendit pas le remords l'entendrait—
there is the very note of conscience done into speech, cast into form, forged into substance.
Avec de l'équité condensée en airain.
But this couplet for immensity of imaginative range, is of one birth with the sublimest verses in the Book of Job:—
Et toute l'épouvante éparse au ciel est sœurDe cet impénétrable et morne avertisseur.
From the magnificent overture to the second series, in which the poet has embodied in audible and visible symbol the vision whence this book was conceived—a vision so far surpassing the perhaps unconsciously imitative inspiration of the Apocalypse, with its incurably lame and arduously prosaic efforts to reproduce the effect or mimic the majesty of earlier prophecies, that we are amazed if not scandalized to find that book actually bracketed in one sublime passage of this prelude with the greatest spiritual poem in the world, the Oresteia of Æschylus—the reader would infer that any student wishing to give a notion of theLégende des Sièclesought to have dwelt less than I have done upon a few of its innumerable beauties, and more than I have done upon the impression of its incomparable grandeur. But samples of pure sweetness and beauty are more easily and perhaps more profitably detached for quotation from their context than samples of a sublimity which can only be felt by full and appreciative study of an entire and perfect poem. And it is rather from the prelude itself than from any possible commentary on it that a thoughtful and careful reader will seek to gather the aim and meaning of the book. It is there likened to a vast disjointed ruin lit by gleams of light—"le reste effrayant de Babel"—a palace and a charnel in one, built by doom for death to dwell in:—
Où se posent pourtant parfois, quand elles l'osent,De la façon dont l'aile et le rayon se posent,La liberté, lumière, et l'espérance, oiseau.
But over and within this book—
traduitDu passé, du tombeau, du gouffre et de la nuit—
faith shines as a kindling torch, hope breathes as a quickening wind, love burns as a cleansing fire. It is tragic, not with the hopeless tragedy of Dante or the all but hopeless tragedy of Shakespeare. Whether we can or cannot share the infinite hope and inviolable faith to which the whole active and suffering life of the poet has borne such unbroken and imperishable witness, we cannot in any case but recognize the greatness and heroism of his love for mankind. As in the case of Æschylus, it is the hunger and thirst after righteousness, the deep desire for perfect justice in heaven as on earth, which would seem to assure the prophet's inmost heart of its final triumph by the prevalence of wisdom and of light over all claims and all pleas established or asserted by the children of darkness, so in the case of Victor Hugo is it the hunger and thirst after reconciliation, the love of loving kindness, the master passion of mercy, which persists in hope and insists on faith even in face of the hardest and darkest experience through which a nation or a man can pass. When evil was most triumphant throughout Europe, he put forth in a single book of verse, published with strange difficulty against incredible impediments, such a protest as would entitle him to say, in the very words he has given to the Olympian of old—
Quand, dans le saint paean par les mondes chanté,L'harmonie amoindrie avorte ou dégénère,Je rends le rhythme aux cieux par un coup de tonnerre:
and now more than ever would the verses that follow befit the lips of their author, if speaking in his own person:—
Mon crâne plein d'échos, plein de lueurs, plein d'yeux,Est l'antre éblouissant du grand Pan radieux;En me voyant on croit entendre le murmureDe la ville habitée et de la moisson mûre,Le bruit du gouffre au chant de l'azur réuni,L'onde sur l'océan, le vent dans l'infini,Et le frémissement des deux ailes du cygne.
It is held unseemly to speak of the living as we speak of the dead; when Victor Hugo has joined the company of his equals, but apparently not till then, it will seem strange to regard the giver of all the gifts we have received from him with less than love that deepens into worship, than worship that brightens into love. Meantime it is only in the phrase of one of his own kindred, poet and exile and prophet of a darker age than his, that the last word should here be spoken of the man by whose name our century will be known forever to all ages and nations that keep any record or memory of what was highest and most memorable in the spiritual history of the past:—
Onorate l'altissimo poeta.